Extinction: Something to Avoid

I can get on board with this. After all, what kind of example will we be setting for our children if we’re so irresponsible as to let ourselves go extinct? Or worse, as Neil deGrasse Tyson points out, think of the hit to the self esteem of our dead selves if we let the planet get hit by a killer asteroid:

If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, we would be the laughing stock of aliens in the galaxy, for having a large brain and a space program, yet we met the same fate as that pea-brained, space program-less dinosaurs that came before us.

Stupid humans. But is there no hope to spare us such galactic schadenfreude? Perhaps there is room for solace:

The chances that your tombstone will read “Killed by Asteroid” are about the same as they’d be for “Killed in Airplane Crash.”

Come to think of it, the odds of you actually having a tombstone are infinitely greater if your demise comes while strapped in a lawn chair inside an aluminum tube squirting old dinosaurs out its back-end than they are if some massive space rock – in blatant disregard for all EPA rules and regulations – cleans out all life on the planet. Unless, of course, masons have some sort of special immunity or professional courtesy arrangement with space rocks.